Statistical mechanics of animal movement: Animals's decision-making can result in superdiffusive spread

Peculiarities of individual animal movement and dispersal have been a major focus of recent research as they are thought to hold the key to the understanding of many phenomena in spatial ecology. Superdiffusive spread and long-distance dispersal have been observed in different species but the underlying biological mechanisms often remain obscure. In particular, the effect of relevant animal behavior has been largely unaddressed. In this paper, we show that a superdiffusive spread can arise naturally as a result of animal behavioral response to small-scale environmental stochasticity. Surprisingly, the emerging fast spread does not require the standard assumption about the fat tail of the dispersal kernel.